Canada Convicts 2 Of Kidnapping Jaffe

TORONTO — Two Americans, including an Orlando man, were convicted Wednesday of kidnapping Toronto businessman Sidney Jaffe in 1981 and spiriting him to Florida to face trial.

An Ontario Supreme Court jury deliberated for more than 12 hours before reaching its verdict against Daniel Kear, 37, of Fairfax, Va., and Timm Johnsen, 43, of Orlando.

The jurors found that the two violated Canadian law when they escorted Jaffe, a 61-year-old real estate developer, across the border to answer 28 charges of land sales violations in North Florida.

Associate Chief Justice Frank Callaghan ordered Kear and Johnsen held in jail until sentencing June 9. Although the two could receive up to life in prison, the actual sentence could be much lighter.

Johnsen's lawyer, Alan Gold, said the men may be held in protective custody because of their backgrounds as bounty hunters and bondsmen responsible for returning fugitives for trial.

''Mr. Johnsen has been in law enforcement for a long time and caught a number of unsavory people,'' Gold said.

Jaffe, a naturalized Canadian who testified during the 3 1/2-week trial that he was beaten and threatened into returning to Florida, said after the verdict that he wasn't interested in vengeance.

''I only want Canadian sovereignty and any country's sovereignty to be protected,'' he said. ''Kidnapping and things like that can't be tolerated in any society.''

For Kear and Johnsen, the verdict marked the low point of a five-year odyssey that began Sept. 23, 1981, when they arrived in Toronto on a mission for an Orlando bonding company.

Jaffe had failed to appear for trial in May 1981, and the Accredited Surety and Casualty Co. stood to forfeit the $137,500 bail it had posted in exchange for a 10 percent fee.

Johnsen and Kear took Jaffe, dressed in a jogging suit, from his condominium and drove him to Niagara Falls, N.Y., for a private jet flight to Orlando. Within 12 hours he was in the Putnam County jail.

In Kear's words, he did not think at the time that such actions were ''that big a deal'' -- just a job he had performed more than 150 times in the United States during his 14-year career in the bail bonding business in Virginia.

But the clause in the bail bond Jaffe signed that gave the defendants the right to apprehend him was not legal in Canada. Within a few months of Jaffe's return to Florida, Kear and Johnsen had been ordered extradited to stand trial.

The case became an irritant between the Canadian and U.S. governments and was a topic at bilateral talks.

Jaffe was convicted of failure to appear for trial and 28 counts of violating the Florida Uniform Land Sales Practices Act. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

His family acted as a lobbying and public relations team with the purpose of seeing him freed from prison. That goal was reached in late 1983 after a Florida appeal court overturned his land sales convictions. He was later paroled on the failure to appear charge.

He returned to Canada and served as star witness against Johnsen and Kear, who pleaded not guilty to kidnapping Jaffe with the intent to cause him to be unlawfully transported out of Canada against his will.

Kear, the only one of the two defendants to testify during the trial, said he believed at the time he had acted legally. He said it never dawned on him that the bail bonding contract authorizing the arrest of Jaffe if he failed to appear for trial might not apply in Canada.

But Judge Callaghan told the jury that ignorance of the law was no excuse. That left the jury to decide another key issue: whether Jaffe willingly returned with the two accused men to Florida, as they maintained.

Jaffe testified that he screamed for help, was beaten to prevent his escape and spent much of the trip to Florida in handcuffs.

Prosecutor Glen Orr contended that it made no sense for Jaffe to ''give up and go along like a pussycat'' once Kear and Johnsen told him of their intentions.

After all, Jaffe failed to return to Florida for trial and ''picked and clawed'' to stay away, he said.

But lawyers for Johnsen and Kear told the jury there was no struggle because Jaffe believed -- as did Johnsen and Kear -- that the bonding contract allowed the men to return him to Florida.

''He knew what the agreement meant and that he was going back to Florida,'' Gold told the jury. ''There was no fighting, no assaults.''